GIF support

[Brian Gerst]

Russell Coker wrote:
> On Sat, 26 Jun 2004 04:01, Andres Petralli <apetralli at icu.unizh.ch> wrote:
> 
>>I'm interested in knowing when GIF support will be re-included into
>>packages like PHP, ImageMagick and other image processing and
>>generation tools. GIF, as you might know was covered by patents until
>>the 20th of June 2004. The patents are now expired worldwide and gif
>>code could be easily re-activated in libs like GD and PHP. It was
> 
> 
> GIF is not suitable for photos (doesn't compress well at today's color depth).  
> PNG makes a file of comparable size to GIF for generated graphics or other 
> situations where you want non-lossy compression.
> 
> So what does GIF offer?  In the past it offered compatibility with older 
> software but that shouldn't be an issue now.
> 
> Adding it to specialised image processing tools may be good for compatibility, 
> but is there a real need to add it to every program that supports writinga 
> graphics file?
> 

If the upstream version of the software supports GIF and that support 
was disabled by Redhat, then there is no reason not to reenable that 
support.  He's not talking about adding support where it didn't 
pre-exist upstream in the first place.

--
				Brian Gerst